The world of Raspberry Pi is evolving quickly, with many new interface boards and software libraries becoming available all the time. In this cookbook, prolific hacker and author Simon Monk provides more than 200 practical recipes for running this tiny low-cost computer with Linux, programming it with Python, and hooking up sensors, motors, and other hardware—including Arduino.

You’ll also learn basic principles to help you use new technologies with Raspberry Pi as its ecosystem develops. Python and other code examples from the book are available on GitHub. This cookbook is ideal for programmers and hobbyists familiar with the Pi through resources such as Getting Started with Raspberry Pi (O’Reilly).

Simon Monk

Dr. Simon Monk has a degree in Cybernetics and Computer Science and a PhD in Software Engineering. Simon spent several years as an academic before he returned to industry, co-founding the mobile software company Momote Ltd. He has been an active electronics hobbyist since his early teens. Simon is author of a number of hobby electronics books including '30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius', '15 Dangerously Mad Projects for the Evil Genius' and 'Arduino + Android Projects for the Evil Genius'.

This is a great book for ideas of what to do with the Raspberry Pi along with sufficient details for implementation without belabouring the point.

There is one thing that drives me wild about the book though: the circuits are shown pictorially on a breadboard and other environments. However, there are very few circuit diagrams to make it clear what the circuit is doing. I find the first thing I do for a project is reverse engineer the board into a schematic diagram and then build from the diagram, rather than the pictorial presentation.

Other than that, there's lots of good stuff in the book, and it's a very worthy addition to the O'Reilly library.

If your into small powerful computers like the Raspberry Pi, then this book is the perfect compliment. Makers will appreciate the in depth how too's that this book has to offer. The ebook version makes it easy to keep it handy on your tablet for instant reference. I would certainly buy this book again if I ever lost my copy...

At the time of this review, the book is roughly 160 pages with 6.11 recipe as the last. Compare to the estimated 500 pages of the print edition and estimated December 2013 publishing date, there should be a ton more to come.

This is the same author as many of the Arduino books, so I was looking forward to some of the arduin-Pi integration recipes. They were not found in the early release, but presumably will be available in the later date as the book gets completed. The early chapters cover the basics, setup, cabling, networking, getting around the Linux interface, basic Python, etc. Personally I am a bit beyond the basics, but always good to have a one-stop book for these things other than having them all over the bookmarks.

As with book of this nature, they introduce the basics to get an aspect of Raspberry Pi up and running, but mileage may vary depending on how far you want to take them. I did learn a new thing or two on file and screen sharing natively on Mac (instead of VNC), and packages that allow easy camera capture server of a Pi.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and can't wait for the rest of the recipes to come out.

I finally got around to buying a Raspberry Pi and started to do a little setup when I saw the early release of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. I received this early release as part of the program and I have to say I'm very happy with the book so far.For most Cookbooks, you have to have a general idea or experience of the topic the book is about. The same is true here except what you need to know is how to navigate your way around a terminal, whether it by Putty for Windows or any terminal for Linux or Mac. If you know your way around a terminal window, then you'll be just fine with this book.The book goes over the basics of everything on how to get your rPi setup. Ideally, you'll start off with it connected to a monitor and keyboard with a mouse and everything will go smoothly. After that, you can run "headless" if you would like by using ssh to do everything else assuming you have it connected to the your router or use a wireless USB dongle.Once you get it setup, the book goes over in nice detail, how to work on the rPi. If you're familiar with Linux, you don't need to worry about Chapter 3. If not though, it's a nice little primer on how to work through the terminal.The software section is fairly useful, although I haven't really used most of the stuff as I didn't really see a need for the software myself. If you want some of it yourself, it'll be useful.The Python section was nice and gets you going but you'll want a more comprehensive book on Python if you're learning.The last section on GPIO was okay and it was in an early release form and needs more work. I can't really say much about it since I don't have the hardware to interface with it yet but it looked useful.

As an unfinished book, I thought it was pretty good where everything was in a more polished form. There are parts that are missing towards the end of this portion and notes for the author himself but it's expected of an early release title. I look forward to the completed version. I'll try to remember to update the review when the full version is released.

I read the early, unedited release of the RaspberryPi Cookbook, but this doesn't mean it isn't complete. For a starter in open source hardware (like me) this book is perfect. It explains everything and when say everything I mean everything :), it helps you to choose your hardware, it gives you advices what power supply should you choose for your RaspberryPi based on what do you want to use it for. The book guides you through the steps of OS installation and configuration, network setup. The book contains great examples, what to use the RaspberryPi for (NAS, printing server, file sharing over network).

The author kept in mind, that some of us does not want to use the RaspberryPi for development or for building robots, electrical systems; so he wrote down some steps how to use RaspberryPi for playing games like OpenArena (a Quake III clone - for you who are not familiar with, it's First Person Shooter - FPS game). Also there is exactly described how to use the RaspberryPi as a Media Center using XBMC.

The information which is available in this book can be found spread over the Internet, but there, you do not have written down in this clean, concise style which is easy to read and understand.

The thing which I like the most in the book is, it contains a lot of useful code samples for the Python programming language so you can immediately start "hacking" on your RaspberryPi.